Fiji climate guide: monthly weather averages

The Fiji climate guides are perfect for planning your holiday. Monthly weather averages give the best indication of what the weather is usually like for every month of the year including figures for temperature, rainfall and sunshine. The climate guide shown below is for Suva.

Fiji climate overview

Fiji is an archipelago of over 300 islands in the south-west Pacific about 1,200 miles north of New Zealand. It lies within the tropics at approximately the same latitude as Cairns in Queensland and has a tropical climate with rainfall in all months of the year.

Indigenous Fijians make up just over half of the population, the remainder are mainly descendants of Indians who came over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to work on the sugar plantations.

Many of the smaller islands of Fiji are coral atolls, less than half of which are inhabited, but the two main islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu are volcanic in origin and make up about 90% of the land area of the whole country.

The interiors of both these larger islands are mountainous and densely forested while the valleys and coastal plains are all heavily cultivated, mostly with sugarcane. In coastal areas plantations of coconut palms are common.

The number of good beaches on both Viti Levu and Vanua Levu is limited by the many reefs and mangroves that line the coasts. However on the smaller islands, particularly Mamanuca and Yasawa to the west of Viti Levu, and Rotuma, nearly 600 kilometres (370 miles) to the north, there are plenty of spectacular white sandy beaches.

The climate of Fiji is typically tropical with fairly constant temperatures year-round. The Southern Hemisphere summer, which runs from November to March, is when Fiji receives most of its rainfall. Rain generally blows in from the south east on the trade winds, and falls most heavily on the windward side of the larger islands.

The capital Suva, on the east of Viti Levu, receives annually almost twice the amount of rainfall as Lautoka where the main airport is located in the west. The northern and western shores of these larger islands also receive more sunshine than the south east, particularly between May and October when there can be significantly more sunshine in the west.

Overall the wettest month is usually March and the driest month is almost always July. Daytime temperatures are warm to hot throughout the year peaking in January and February, and heat and humidity is high between December and April.

Fiji lies within the South Pacific cyclone belt, but cyclones are rare, with only about one coming anywhere close to the islands each year. Earthquakes are however fairly common and are accompanied often by landslides and tsunamis.